From a formalist perspective, the facial features are stylised, veering
towards abstraction, linearity. The hair curls, and there are striking
vertical markings on the cheeks that are suggestive of West African ritual
scarification. Eyes – and ears – are open, mouth is closed. This face as
represented is not in the act of speech, but it is attentive. It is a face that
could be female, maybe male, or indifferent and undifferentiated. The
title maintains a gender neutrality, stating only that it is a ‘Hieratic Head’.

Composed on a linen ground, most of the facial details are
embroidered. There are also three dark fabric panels. They are more
coarsely stitched on, in the manner of a quilt, the narrow rectangular
panels evoking in particular Kente strip weaving and its echoes in African-
American quilting traditions.

This ‘Hieratic Head’ makes allusions that seem to be undercut by the
medium: the ‘applied art’ of embroidery. Frances Richards attended the
Royal College of Art, where she received formal training in art and was
especially drawn to learning tempera and fresco painting. What about
embroidery, and quilting – where and when did she learn those craft
techniques? And why, given her training, did she choose to create toiles
brodées that evoke the kind of women’s work that was widely taught to
girls, rather than learnt in college? Perhaps it is not the title but the very
medium of embroidery that makes the strongest, and most poignant,
intellectual claim here, by pointing to our assumptions about the
materials and methods that are usually deemed suitable for artistic and
intellectual expression.

Commentary by Sophie White, Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is the
author of Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana (2012)
and the forthcoming Intimate Voices of the African Diaspora: Narrating Slavery in French America 2019.